Then there was the time as a kid when I expected a bike for Christmas, and so was horrendously ungrateful when I ‘only’ got some cool trainers and a tennis racquet. And who can forget, of course, my 'obviously ridiculous' expectation that surely Konami would have got its head round making Pro Evolution Soccer work online with its latest attempt...

Anyway, all of this overwrought nonsense is actually a preposterously convoluted and round-the-houses way of describing high-profile PS3 exclusive FPS, Haze. And what I’m trying to say is that Haze is a just-about-average game that becomes a really pretty shit one under the pressure of the mounds of expectation piled on top of it. To explain...

If you come to Haze by accident, stumbling across it having miraculously avoided all the hype and buzz-talk surrounding this high-profile PS3-exclusive FPS, you might not hate it.

Indeed, you might even glean a few moments of pleasure from it here and there, especially if you've also never played a true next-gen FPS star like Halo 3, Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, Half-Life 2 or Gears of War and so don't have a high frame of FPS reference.

However, if you've felt so much as a raised pulse rate at the hype for Haze, or enjoyed a truly high quality FPS at any point in the last 18 months, Haze might very well make you want to cry.

Seriously, the game fails - or at least falls short of where it should - in pretty much every department.

For starters, there's the story. In synopsis form it doesn't look bad; there's the potential for some neat 'anti-war', 'anti-big business' messages to get in there, and perhaps a little morality ping pong to keep things interesting as you switch sides in your fight and then start to worry that your new cause is actually no better than your old one.

But the reality is that the game's script is so amateurishly written and presented that it falls totally flat, and entirely fails to give you any kind of emotional connection with what you're doing, no matter what side you're on.

At least part of the blame for this has to lie squarely at the door of the game's cut scenes, which despite often being rather lengthy are also generally vapidly or pretentiously scripted, and presented with all the cinematic flare of a breeze block.

Not to put too fine a point on it, just one of the hundreds of cut-scenes in Grand Theft Auto IV has more character, with and impact than all the cut scenes in Haze put together.

Even worse, because the story fails to engage you and so always seems considerably less important than it thinks it is, you get a few truly cringe-worthy moments where the game designers clearly think they're delivering a big emotional punch with a particular line or scene when in fact they're just embarrassing themselves. The 'Don't tell my mum' moment is a classic case in point. Shudder.

Another big failing in the story is way it lets you play with the potentially quite cool 'NECTAR' powers of the Mantel soldiers for a level or two, and then rips them unceremoniously away for the rest of the single-player game, never letting you have them back. Given that NECTAR tricks include enemies becoming more visible and a hilariously powerful melee ability, it seems really crazy, almost perverse to give you nothing but a quick hands on with these potentially intriguing combat possibilities before leaving you to rue their loss for the rest of the campaign!

Next to annoy is the AI - or rather, lack of AI - of the console-controlled characters. Basically, they're thick as pig-shit. In fact, scratch that; your console-controlled team-mates are actually thicker than pig-shit, for at least your average pile of pig-shit doesn't run in front of its other pig-shit friends' guns at every possible opportunity. Nor does it somehow contrive to run under the wheels of an unmissably vast friendly vehicle that’s moving at roughly the pace of middle-aged snail (as happens repeatedly during the truly painful Boa Bridge sequence).

As for the enemy AI, I lost count of the number of times I'd charge around a corner to find an enemy soldier just standing there, stock still, refusing to move under any circumstances until I'd shot his face off. Clearly this sort of rank enemy stupidity does not an intense shooter make.

Also mostly crap is the game's level design. Far too often combat feels like an excitement-free drudge; a case of simply standing near a bit of scenery and picking enemies off in the distance with no real tension or intensity involved at all. And to make matters worse, you can't even 'use' the scenery in a proper cover system like you can in Gears of War, GRAW, Rainbow 6 or even GTA IV. This really limits your involvement with your environment, and drastically reduces the amount of strategy you can bring to the table as you approach a new section.

The net result of all this is that you nearly always feel like you're just playing a game - and a bland one at that - rather than feeling as if you're actually experiencing some sort of critical event, as happens constantly with COD4, Gears of War and Bioshock.

If the main shooting-shit-up bits of Haze are generally poor, though, the driving sections that provide transitions between many of the game's locations are truly lamentable. Control of the vehicles is so unconvincing, slipshod and frustrating that it's hard to believe anyone at Free Radical has actually tried using them at all. I even had a genuine 'Austin Powers' moment for god’s sake where, through little fault of my own, I got my rebel jeep neatly jammed between two valley walls, requiring a truly mind-numbing amount of forward and reverse before I could finally free myself and continue down the road.

I also found it very frustrating during the driving sequences that I wasn't able to rotate the camera right around the vehicle; only around 180 degrees or so seemed to be possible, often making it aggravatingly hard to spot where fire was coming from.

The final nails in the gameplay coffin are that the single-player campaign is way too short - most players will have completed it within 8 hours tops - and that it provides practically no incentive to keep you playing even during those 8 hours.

For instance, the story isn't compelling enough; there's hardly any understanding of pacing; there are far too few real stand out moments or grand set-pieces (I finished one of the game’s rare ‘boss’ battles in a second with a single head shot!) to keep you interested; the characters aren't engaging enough; the lack of variety in the enemies is depressing; and the general lack of imagination and visual flare on show removes any sense of anticipation about what might be just around the corner.

If I take off my expectation-tinted spectacles for a moment, I might see that there are one or two moments where Haze’s Campaign comes to life. It’s certainly more fun – if only marginally – if you take advantage of the provided four-player co-op option. Even though my experience is that you and your team-mates will spend most of your time bitching about how much better the game should have been!

There’s a bit, too, where you have to fight your way through a ruined hotel that oddly contains moments of genuine tension, atmosphere and intensity. I also quite enjoyed the ‘observatory’ section, and found the checkpoint ‘save’ system generally well judged (except for the way a co-op save game overwrites any previous single-player save you may have going).

But the simple facts of the matter are that for every one of Haze’s good points, there are a dozen others where it just doesn’t make the grade.

Honestly, for a game that’s been in development for so long, and which has shown of some pretty swanky screen grabs in the past, Haze’s finished code looks about as ‘next generation’ as a ZX Spectrum.

The single biggest problem is the frankly bizarre lack of detail and texture in environments and character models alike. This makes the world look bland, unconvincing, and light years technically behind the likes of Gears of War and COD4. Even the now really quite old GRAW2 puts Haze’s sharpness and detail to shame.

What’s worse, even though the game has practically no textures to load, it still suffers with ‘texture pop up’ from time to time.

Elsewhere, some of the animations leave plenty to be desired, with some seriously stilted moves. Plus there are one or two very strange lighting situations going on. This is particularly true during the dismal driving sections, as you and the vehicles you’re in appear to be lit completely independently of the world around you, making it feel like you’re driving some old ‘sprite-based graphic’ around rather than making you feel like you’re part of the game’s environment.

The picture sometimes looks annoyingly soft, too, hiding distant details behind the sort of mist used by last-gen consoles to hide their hardware limitations. Maybe this is why the game is called Haze?!

There are noticeable pauses in the graphics when you reach most checkpoints, too, and some curious things like pauses and momentary black outs can occur during one or two cut scenes.

To be fair, things aren’t a total dead loss graphically. Some locations do actually enjoy a pretty large draw distance, and one or two sections handle some pretty big objects – such as the Mantel Landcruiser – without a trace of slow-down from the 30 frames per second rate.

Still, it’s a damn shame that achieving this 30fps consistency is presumably why Haze has to appear so devoid of textures. Especially as the game requires an astonishing 5GB of memory space for its up-front installation and save game.

Think about this; if other games take the same approach on a typical 40GB PS3, you’ll only have room for eight games installed on your console at any one time! Crazy.

On the upside the game’s musical score – presented in DTS 5.1, according to my AV receiver, even though the game box suggests it should be Dolby Digital 5.1! – is quite effective if hardly original or particularly memorable.

The soundstage is decently ‘busy’ too, trying to create a sense of urgency with some meaty explosions and aggressive gun-fire.

The voice acting, meanwhile, has received a bit of a pummelling from many quarters, but I didn’t think it was that bad, actually. A bit lacklustre and disinterested, perhaps, but no worse. For me the truly glaring faults are with the script, not its delivery.

One thing I did really hate, though, was the limited vocabulary of the AI team mates who join you on the campaign. Hearing the same, usually crap line repeated time and time again as you advance is excruciating after a while, and smacks of development laziness.

I was also rather alarmed to find the sound occasionally just dropping out completely from time to time, and didn’t find the rear channel speakers being used as aggressively as they might have been in creating a truly three-dimensional world around you. There were definitely many occasions where I felt that the lack of a well-placed audio cue meant I unfairly wasn’t alerted to an enemy behind me, leading to a few instant and unavoidable deaths. Annoying.

We’ve already mentioned earlier in this review how the four-player co-op mode enhances – a little – the otherwise drab campaign mode. But it’s the full online play that finally gets your pulse properly racing, as you find yourself going toe to toe with up to 15 other players across six respectably designed – and likeably varied – multiplayer maps.

There really are a few good thrills to be had in taking out a hugely distant enemy with a well placed sniper shot, running an enemy down in a vehicle, or best of all coming out on top in a simple machine gun face off.

Somehow the graphics engine seems more effective during multiplayer battles too – if only, perhaps, because we’re more used to accepting graphical compromises of the sort that define Haze when playing multiplayer maps.

I also appreciated how simple it is to sign into the online service, and for the most part found the lobby system engagingly stable and straightforward. In other words, I seldom if ever had any problems quickly finding and joining a game.

I also appreciated the fact that you can add ‘bots’ of varying abilities to online games – perfect if you want to have more fun on largish map when you’ve only managed to rustle up one or two mates.

More good news found me experiencing impressively few moments of lag during my online play, and only a handful of dropped connections, all of which occurred, strangely, when playing Ranked games.

There’s a nice touch, too, in the ‘reward’ system at the end of an online game where you can find out which players won, say, the ‘most suicides’ badge.

However, this reward system also ushers in the limitations of Haze’s online experience, for the badges you can earn are meaningless in the sense that they don’t earn you any further rewards, or even get retained as a permanent marker on your player record.

There’s also no real sense of advancement of your character through online play, even if you play in the ‘ranked’ section of the game. In other words, rising up the global leaderboards is your only reward for keeping playing, rather than earning new weapons and abilities like you get in the truly awesome COD4 online mode.

The net result of all this is that there’s no real compulsion to keep playing Haze’s online mode once the initial appeal has worn off – and since the game only provides a rather paltry three gameplay modes (Team Assault, Team Deathmatch and straight Deathmatch), I have to say I don’t expect this initial appeal to last particularly long.